With the development of the semiconductor technolog y, the GPU’s floating point computing capacity impr oves rapidly. How to apply the GPU technology to the non-graphic computing field becomes a highlight in the research of high performance computing. The Roberts edge detection a lgorithm is a typical image processing algorithms. A fast Roberts edge detection algorithm is presented based on GPU, Texture memory technology and asynchronous data transmission are adopted to optimize the applicatio n of the algorithm. The experiment expressed that w e could get a over ten times speed effect by this method than tra ditional Roberts edge detection algorithm.